Test ETag Browser Caching with cURL Requests

Recently I’ve been playing around with Netlify and as a result I’m becoming more familiar with caching strategies commonly found with content delivery networks (CDN). One such strategy makes use of ETag identifiers for web resources.

In short, an ETag identifier is a value, typically a hash, that represents the version of a particular web resource. The resource is cached within the browser along with the ETag value and that value is used when determining if the particular cached resource has changed remotely.

We’re going to explore how to simulate the requests that the browser makes when working with ETag identifiers, but using simple cURL requests instead.

Don't Be Afraid Of Grep

One of the most powerful commands that you could learn, grep is essentially a robust search tool. It gets its name from the acronym it stands for which is global regular expression print. This is just a fancy way of saying “to search for specific strings or patterns (using regular expressions) within a specific file or directory and print the matching results”.

Manage Passwords With GPG, The Command Line, And Pass

There are a lot of password managers on the market, some in the cloud, some local, all with features that may or may not be useful in all circumstances. I’m personally an advocate of being in control of your secure information and shedding reliance on closed source or cloud alternatives. This is why I use pass, the standard unix password manager.

The pass application is Mac and Linux compatible, but Windows support probably isn’t impossible. The application works by maintaining a list of password files that have been encrypted using GPG, a widely used cryptography software. Decrypting the files will result in access to your password information.

We’re going to take a look at using pass and see why it is a convenient option for password management.